Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

Albania’s achievements

Albania has made huge strides to improving its governance, as many international international organisations can attest.

Your article “Paralysis halts progress” (4-11 November) singles out corruption among the problems holding back Albania’s progress towards EU membership. What may be less familiar to your readers, and perhaps deserves more recognition, is that Albania has made huge strides, by concrete, measurable standards, in improving good governance.

This is confirmed in a plethora of reports from credible institutions, such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Millennium Challenging Corporation (established by the US) and Transparency International, which in its latest annual ranking moved the country up by eight notches. Such progress lies behind the swift growth of our national income in the past five years.

Fortunately, EU home affairs and justice ministers recognise the Albanian government’s determination to stick to its agreements, tighten border and travel security, and fight corruption. Our citizens have now been rewarded by visa-free travel in the Schengen area, something that will enormously encourage efforts to modernise our society and create jobs.

The achievements followed hard and radical reform and comprehensive use of IT systems, now in place from university admissions to digitalised company registration. This has brought about a sea-change in how we run things, a fact recognised by a 2010 UN Public Service Award for being the first country in the world to have a 100% digital public-procurement process.

Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe considered our general elections in 2009 to be the best elections in Albania’s history, with nothing to suggest voting fraud.

And, so I hear, political logjams, with attendant shouting and lurid accusations, can even occur in long-established democracies.